


Take Care

by devovere



Series: Intimacies [10]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Angst and Smut, Episode: s02e25 Resolutions, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-15 15:52:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15416388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devovere/pseuds/devovere
Summary: Voyagerwill return with a cure in thirty hours. Kathryn and Chakotay both know what duty requires of them. But how can they set each other aside now?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Heartfelt thanks to beta-readers Killermanatee, BlackVelvet42, and Klugtiger. Their editing work in succession helped me trim over three thousand words, clarify Chakotay’s inner thoughts and feelings, revise a major theme necessitating _*horrified gasp*_ a change in title, and smooth my storytelling in myriad little yet essential moments. If our stories are our children, their contributions are proof that it does indeed take a village.

He borrowed me from the tomato patch, saying he wanted my opinion on something in the house. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t the schematics for a wooden boat. 

I started envisioning a little trip down the river. To explore, he said, as if we were pioneers without detailed sensor data for a quarter of the continent around us. We joked about how we would manage without our bathtub, ignoring that we'd already made love a dozen times in the very same river we’d be piloting. 

I opened my mouth to ask about waterproofing the joins when a voice came from the grave ... from the stars. 

_ This is Tuvok … please respond.  _

I did. Forgive me, Chakotay. I answered the call. 

=====

Later, I would fantasize that I’d already built the boat and that we were twenty kilometers down the river when the call came. That somehow we had escaped detection, as if they might have only dropped in, found us not at home, and left again without so much as a note, leaving us blissfully unaware of the chance for escape they’d brought. 

Not for my sake. Truly not. I didn’t want to stay here, once I knew we didn’t have to. 

But for hers. For how Tuvok’s voice and the news he delivered so dispassionately brought the weight of the quadrant crashing down onto her shoulders again. 

I could see the decision in her eyes almost instantly. She was shocked, but captains don’t get to stay stunned for long. She took approximately no time to reach the conclusion that we were through. I could see it in her eyes, her blue-gray eyes two shades darker than the dress she wore that morning, filled with grief and remorse. 

Kathryn was mourning us and killing us at the very same time. 

=====

His face. He looked at me like a man determined to die bravely. 

I took a breath, intending to say something understated like, “Well, this is a surprise.” 

Instead I broke down. 

The tears came first, and only then the pain, a stabbing deep in my gut so sharp that I felt blindly for the knife protruding from my abdomen. I was so surprised -- by my violent weeping, by the absence of a gaping wound in my body -- that I didn’t even have the presence of mind to cover my face with my hands. 

I dimly felt him grip my arms, heard him say my name. I was shaking my head, crying too hard to speak. He drew me close, cradling my head against his chest, an arm around my back. 

_ This _ .  _ This is what I’ll lose. Again. _

He began to soothe me with words. “Shhh, Kathryn. It’ll be all right. We’ll be okay. Don’t cry, beloved, please. I’m with you.” I calmed somewhat, reduced to hiccups and whimpers. 

Then he said, “I’ll stay by your side, Kathryn.” 

I tore myself away from his embrace, searching his face desperately for some way to make sense of what had happened, of what would happen next. A cure, our return to the ship -- this was what I had worked so hard for, what I had dreamed of. Now I felt I was trying to wake myself from a nightmare. 

Shaking my head, I backed away from him. My overwhelming sense of loss blotted out everything else: his warm eyes upon me, the future we had imagined together, and the past that was now returning to claim me, body and soul. 

“No,” I rasped, choking on another sob. “No!” 

I turned and left the shelter in a daze, hardly knowing where I was going. Just wanting somehow to remove myself from the situation, get some distance from it so I could think. 

=====

I confess: Her distraught tears made my heart leap with joy. 

I had expected her to straighten her shoulders, square her jaw, and don her captain’s persona like armor. Push everything she might be feeling down under layers of command training and protocol and set to writing reports in between packing up to leave the planet. 

But as soon as she looked me in the eye, she couldn’t. 

She knew what she was supposed to do; we both knew our duty. But her cries of “No!” echoed in my mind. 

Together we would defy protocol. 

I knew we would have the crew’s support to return and live as a couple while serving as the command team. Tuvok -- her conscience, the closest thing she had to a father figure out here -- was the only person whose opinion might present an obstacle, but the prospect of revealing our relationship to him didn’t really worry me. 

The only thing I needed to leave this planet hand in hand with the woman I loved was her consent and cooperation … and I felt sure that the formidable Kathryn Janeway could not possibly be reduced to a weeping mess at the prospect of giving me up if she actually intended to go through with it. My gut told me that her tears were my guarantee of a continued place in her heart. 

=====

He gave me time and space to sort through my feelings and our radically altered reality. Obviously, I needed it. Being faced with ending our relationship had completely exceeded my ability to cope. 

I'd loved and lost before, of course. Who hadn't? But I had never set aside nor been set aside by a man I'd loved, and then continued on seeing him every day. I couldn't fathom it. 

I wondered if now he would help me rebuild that wall between us. He understood the rationale behind the protocol, even if the rules themselves left a lot of room for interpretation. I could no longer plead fidelity to a distant fiancé, but the good of the ship still transcended all other considerations. I knew he wouldn't dispute that. 

_ Thirty hours. Just over a day to figure out how to leave him. How to go back to what we were.  _

=====

After a couple hours, when she hadn’t returned for lunch or to talk about what we needed to do before leaving, I became worried enough to seek her out. 

She was by the river, our usual picnic spot, sitting in the grass, bent over her knees like her head was too heavy for her neck. 

I sat down next to her. She didn’t speak or look up, but after a minute, she leaned against me. 

I put an arm around her shoulders and kissed her hair. 

“I know,” I said. “It’s a lot to get our heads around, isn’t it?” 

She let her hands fall to her lap and nodded, gazing out over the river. 

“It’s so beautiful here,” she mused, sounding distant. “I can’t help feeling I never appreciated that.” 

Then she turned to look at me. Without quite meeting my eyes, she brought a finger to my mouth, tracing the outline of my lips. Then she seized my head with both hands and pulled me down for a hungry kiss. I melted against her, overwhelmed with love for her. 

She settled against my chest, arms around my waist, mine around hers. Eventually I said, “Come on. We need to eat and then we should start packing up to leave.” As we walked, I silently drew our communicators from my pocket, fastened one to my chest and handed the other to her. 

=====

While I’d been brooding by the river, he had prepared our lunch, made a list of tasks, and started disassembling our heavier equipment. We planned to do everything we could to minimize  _ Voyager _ ’s time in orbit, lest the Vidiians detect and intercept it. 

Accordingly, we decided not to dismantle the shelter. It wouldn’t stand more than another year or so without maintenance, and we deemed the risk to the planet’s evolutionary course too minimal to justify prolonging  _ Voyager _ ’s stay in order to remove it. 

We heard nothing further from the ship -- no doubt Tuvok would keep communications to a bare minimum to avoid attracting Vidiian attention -- but every hour that passed got us closer to rejoining our crew. I told myself that everything would be different, then, and our months here on New Earth would very soon feel like a distant memory. 

We made our supper entirely from fresh foods, harvested and foraged. We would bring a variety of plants and seeds I’d been collecting, for Kes to try in the aeroponics bay, but I still felt sad to leave my garden untended. 

Chakotay caught me gazing at the spot where we’d made passionate love once, before the latest seedlings had been planted. He suggested I could satisfy my green thumb helping Kes. I just looked at him until he added, “I don’t suppose you’ll have time, though.” 

“No,” I agreed. “I won’t. But let’s make the most of the time we have now.” And I went to fill the bathtub. 

He surprised me on the platform with a replicated bottle of wine and two glasses. “Should we?” I asked. 

“It’s our last night. A special occasion.” He was somber. 

I breathed a sigh of relief and gave him a genuine smile. Maybe he was going to help me close the door on our time together after all. 


	2. Chapter 2

She was so sad about leaving the garden. As we relaxed in the tub, her back to my chest, I made a mental resolution to work more direct oversight of aeroponics into her shipboard duties. If I took on navigations … 

My tactical mind was brought up short as she set her wine glass down and turned to face me, kneeling between my legs. With wisps of hair coming loose in the humid air above the bathwater and cheeks rosy from warmth, sun, and wine, she was the picture of vibrant health and sensuality. I began to pull her towards me for a kiss, but she resisted the motion, her hands on my chest, keeping me at a distance. 

“I want to look at you.” 

Her calm request echoed our first night in my bed, some six weeks ago now. I had a powerful sense of things coming full circle. “Kathryn, I want to tell you ...” But my throat closed. 

I tried again. “This time tomorrow … we’ll be back on the ship. I need you to know first. You’ve made me …” I floundered, lost in her eyes. “Happy is such an inadequate word. But happier than I’ve ever been.” 

She swallowed, and her face became suffused with a longing that belied our circumstance: naked in one another’s arms. 

I went on. “I am never going to forget a single day on this planet with you. I could spend the next seventy years trying and never be able to tell you ... how  _ grateful _ I am. For the chance to love you. To know you this way. To share myself so fully with you. It’s … it’s been everything, Kathryn. Everything.” 

I stopped talking. She gazed at me a little longer, sighed deeply, and then kissed the center of my forehead. It felt like a blessing -- pure, chaste, a mark of protection. 

Then her lips trembled against my skin. 

=====

His words loosed something in me, wild and frantic. It wasn’t what I’d meant to happen when I’d turned to face him. I’d been going to remind us both why we couldn’t continue this on  _ Voyager _ and ask him for one last night together, a night to remember. I’d intended slow, languorous sex, interspersed with little speeches: promises to remain friends, sharing memories from before New Earth. The start of boxing us back into our command team rhythms. 

He blew those plans out of the water with his gratitude, his vulnerability. He was closing the door in his own way and it was so much more pure than mine. He said something about “the next seventy years,” and what I was proposing was suddenly so real to me, to pull away and cut myself off from this vital passion for the rest of my natural life. It was like disemboweling myself, a hollowed-out agony. 

I tried to rise above, to accept my duty with grace and professionalism. But when my lips touched his forehead … 

Simple desperation. Like a glutton sentenced to starve after one last meal. I would have him -- all of him, now -- or die. A spark into a flame into a solar flare, and all we could do was be consumed by one another. I dove into his arms, mouth crashing onto his, panting and whimpering, arms hard around his neck, nails digging into his scalp. If I hurt him, he seemed to understand that it was nothing compared to the pain I was causing myself, severing us for duty. He crushed me against him, squeezing the breath from my lungs, or maybe that was just my own sense of drowning in my need for him. 

_ Our last time _ , I thought frantically, and was filled with fury. The sudden fire in my veins all but set the water boiling around us. Our limbs churned in the water as we grappled to pull one another closer, press more of our skin against the other’s. His teeth grazed my jaw and neck as I gasped cool air only to feel it stoke the flames in my core. 

I pulled free of his embrace, felt for and found his rigid cock with one hand, and then without warning plunged my head underwater and took him into my mouth. He jerked under me, and through the water and my own pounding heartbeat I dimly heard him cry out. He gripped my shoulders and began tugging upwards, trying to draw me back above the surface. I sank down further on his cock, grasping and stroking the shaft below, my other arm wrapped tight around his waist. 

He finally got his legs under him to either side of my head and began to rise from the water. I came with him, kneeling in violent supplication, drawing breath through my nose as I continued to suck at him, voracious in my need to fan the conflagration between us. 

Standing, knees bent alongside my shoulders, grasping the sides of the tub for balance, he began to thrust into my mouth as he never had before. He choked out my name in a tone that went from desperately aroused to furiously intent in the space of a heartbeat, and then he was pulling back, out of my reach, leaving me empty with nothing but steam swirling around my skin. 

“Come back here,” I ordered, and he did. 

He dropped to his own knees before me, water sloshing in huge waves over the edges of the tub, grabbed my hips, and pulled my lower body up and onto his. My legs parted around his waist as my upper body tipped backwards into the water. My hands caught the sides of the tub and then, as I flailed for leverage, he tilted his hips and roughly impaled me, forcing a loud moan from my throat. 

He bent over my body, arching my back over his hands behind my waist, and devoured a breast. As I writhed with pleasure, my hands shifted above my head, pressing me away from the tub and further down on his thrusting cock. “I need you,” I sobbed. “I  _ need  _ you, Chakotay!” He snarled against my chest, rooting blindly for my other breast, and then my legs curled under him, one heel pressed under a buttock and the other between his legs, and he exploded, spasming with ecstasy within and around me, almost crushing my ribs as he came hard, roaring between my breasts and then panting harshly with his eyes screwed shut. 

We hung there, entangled, and then he was muttering, “Not without you. Not  _ ever  _ without you.” And he reared up on his haunches, leaving me horizontal in the water, his cock still semi-rigid within me, and pressed a thumb firmly against my clit. I shrieked, flinging my head back so that water briefly covered my face. I came up gasping as he circled his thumb, fast, hard, relentless, the sheer physical strength of his one arm clamped around my waist keeping me immobile against his body though my feet began to drum against his back. 

“Come for me, Kathryn. Let me see you, you’re so beautiful when it takes you, let me send you there, don’t hold anything back now,  _ come for me Kathryn _ !” And I did, waves of liquid fire pouring through me, wailing my pleasure to the starry night sky as his hand finally stilled against me. 

I must have gone limp, maybe even verged on losing consciousness. He caught me as I sank below the water, lifting me up and against his chest as he sat and leaned back against the tub. 

As the intense pleasure gradually ebbed, as our heart rates began to slow, my brain began working again. And I remembered what tomorrow would bring and bit my lip against the pain. 

=====

She pulled her face back from where she had buried it in my neck, and I was surprised to see sadness in her eyes. The furious intensity that had taken us both by the throat melted at once into tenderness. I gently kissed her cheeks, smoothed her hair back from her brow, and looked questioningly at her. 

She ran her hands along the edge of the tub and tipped her head up to look at the stars overhead. “I’m going to miss this. So very much.” 

I was genuinely touched by her evident attachment to the bathtub -- my first gift to her in our New Earth home. 

I tried to lighten her mood with a joke. “What, isn’t the bathtub in your quarters big enough for us both?” 

She went still in my arms. 

The penny dropped, a sharp little click in my otherwise silent mind. I stopped breathing and closed my eyes. 

She moved off me and began to rise. I caught her wrist. 

“Kathryn.” 

She stood but made no move to leave the tub or extricate herself from my grasp. 

“Kathryn,” I repeated, looking up at her in warning. “Don’t do this. This doesn't have to be goodbye.” 

Her voice, though distant and forlorn, was maddeningly even. “It can’t be goodbye, Chakotay. We’ll be serving together on the same ship. We’ll see each other every day.” 

Her literalness, her deliberate obtuseness, made me suddenly angry. I dropped her wrist and rose to my feet, clambering out of the tub ahead of her. 

“Don’t, dammit. Don’t even try to pretend that you don’t know what I mean. Don’t you dare try to hide your feelings from me now.” 

She stepped out after me and got in my face like a drill sergeant, both of us dripping wet and naked on the platform. 

“Hide? I’m hiding nothing now. There’s no point!” 

“Bullshit, Kathryn! When haven’t you hidden, kept something back? Even here, where I’m literally the last man on the planet! Hell, would it kill you to admit that you love me? When it’s completely fucking obvious that you do??” 

“Not me, you idiot! You! It might kill _you!_ ” The words tumbled out of her like a sudden rockfall. “And I can’t do it again!” She whirled away, snatched up a towel, and headed for the shelter. 


	3. Chapter 3

I ignored him calling my name and managed to stay ahead of him into the shelter, wrapping a towel around myself as I went. In our dressing area, I quickly swapped the towel for loose trousers and a gray t-shirt, Starfleet issue. It was time to start remembering how to comport myself as an officer, in service to a larger organization. 

If my heart wasn’t in it, well, going through the motions would surely spark the old mindset.  _ Fake it until you make it, Janeway _ . 

“What can’t you do again?” His voice was low and gentle, the patient, persistent Chakotay I felt I’d always known. 

He wore clothes I didn’t recognize. As I’d been standing, staring at our shared closet, he must have replicated a new outfit.  _ No point in conserving replicator energy now _ , I thought, and then suddenly wondered if this was all a bad dream, or if we might wake up tomorrow and never hear from  _ Voyager _ at all. It all felt so unreal. 

I heaved a sigh. He was still waiting for an answer. 

“Kill someone I love, Chakotay. I won’t let it happen again.” 

“Justin,” he replied, knowing that’s who I meant, knowing why. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in saying you didn’t kill him.” 

I just looked at him, unflinching. Some dark abyss was opening within me, a cavern of dread, despair, and self-loathing. He wanted to know me? He thought he loved me?  _ Let him see _ . 

He looked back at me, just as unflinching. “So if you don’t love me, you can’t kill me? What kind of sense does that make?” 

He crossed the narrow space to stand in front of me and took one of my hands between his own, rubbing the back with his thumbs. His grace and steadfast presence were almost too much to bear. 

He murmured, “But it’s how you feel.” 

I couldn’t deny it. “Regardless. If I might have to kill you, I can’t love you. That’s what the fraternization protocol boils down to, mostly.” 

“You won’t have to kill me, Kathryn.”

An edge crept into my voice. “I have to put those pips on again and assume the responsibility for sending you to your death if it serves the mission. How can I possibly live with the knowledge I might have to do that and be your lover too?” 

“You told me once that you never commanded me. Did you mean that?” His voice was intense now, and he didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, you won’t command me after our rescue, and you won’t have to. I would die for you; I would die for the ship. As you would, for them and for me. We don’t need protocol to keep those commitments.  _ It’s who we are _ .” 

I wanted to believe him, but it was too easy, too tempting. I pulled my hand away and stepped back. 

“You’re in denial, Chakotay. You think we can go back and take this place with us somehow? You think commanding a starship leaves any room for what we’ve had here? Have you forgotten the red alerts, the hostile aliens, the struggles just to feed our crew and keep flying?” 

He cut in. “No, of course I haven’t forgotten. I just see it differently. In the face of all that, we can’t afford to cut ourselves off from this. From each other.” 

“It’s a distraction --” 

“It’s  _ not _ . It’s fuel. It won’t trip us up; it will keep us going when times are tough. And you know they’re always tough out here.” 

“Justin and I started as a shipboard romance. I was only an ensign and it was all I could manage to balance him and my job.” 

“You were much younger then, and I’m not him,” he objected. “Our situation isn’t comparable.” 

I ignored him, barreling on. “I can’t imagine carrying on this sort of … private life on a ship I’m captaining. Let alone out here, with no backup, no aid.”

“I’m your backup. Our crew is your aid, not only your burden -- hell, they’re coming back to rescue you!  _ We’re enough _ , Kathryn. If you’ll let us be.” 

“I can’t.  _ I can’t _ ! The risk is too great, don’t you see that?” I threw my hands up defensively, as if warding off a physical attack, and was furious to see them trembling. “Enough, Chakotay! Please. If you --” I bit back the word  _ love _ . “If you care about me. If you want to help me. You’ll have to respect my decision.” I swallowed, feeling faint. 

He began to move towards me, but I raised my hands again, and he froze in mid-step then backed away. 

“You know that I will always respect your authority. That I’ll always want to help you.” I let my eyes meet his in the silence. He looked away first. “You will always have my support, Kathryn. Never doubt it.” And then he turned and left the shelter. 

=====

As I walked out into the moonless night, I felt oddly calm for a guy who was getting dumped. I just couldn’t shake my gut-level confidence that in the end she wouldn’t be able to turn her back on what we had now. Was I in denial, as she had argued? 

I found my way the short distance to the trees where the hammock still hung, climbed in, and started myself swaying, letting my thoughts drift. Kathryn had napped here just yesterday. I had passed her on my way back to the new house site, a hot afternoon of heavy carpentry waiting for me. The vision of her sleeping face, relaxed and peaceful, trusting in her safety, had fueled my work for the rest of the day. 

Protecting her, being there for her when she wanted me, however she wanted me … yesterday that had been the plan for the rest of my life. Would our return to the ship really change that? She seemed sure that it would. How could I be so confident that it didn’t have to? 

“I know what love is,” I said out loud, before the memory that gave the words context rose fully to mind. A boyhood conversation with my father. Someone had teased me about a neighbor girl, and as boys that age do, I’d hotly protested. He’d said, “Careful, son -- that kind of talk can have the opposite effect from what you intend.” 

I hadn’t understood his cryptic remark, so he’d explained. Seems he and my mother -- all of seventeen years old, barely out of childhood themselves -- had gotten engaged to be married about five minutes after she’d broken up with him. “She said it was over between us and she never wanted to see me again. Couldn’t figure how she was gonna manage that in a village of fewer than a thousand, but I never got the chance to find out. Next morning she was singing a different tune, and we were married the following summer.” 

He’d ruffled my hair and given me that look that parents sometimes do, when the simple existence of their own child seems to remind them that we’re all just links in a chain that connects past to future. “You kids are lucky,” he’d said. “We’ve shown you your whole lives what love is.” 

And yeah, I was thinking about children again, in a whole new light now with rescue on the horizon. Still didn’t know if Kathryn wanted them. Couldn’t imagine what it would take for her to even consider the question as captain of a ship so far from home. Had to smile at my optimism, thinking I might ever get the chance to father a child with a woman who’d just told me we were through. 

Couldn’t shake my own conviction that I’d be back in her bed one day. 

I'd spent a lifetime waiting for a love like my parents had. Now that I’d found it, I knew nothing could end it short of death. This wasn’t an affair. It wasn’t situational. This was love, and it was more powerful than either of us. 

I stayed in the hammock long enough to give her time to do whatever she needed to do in my absence. I expected that she would detach our two bed frames and move them to opposite sides of the shelter. I wondered if she would come out to find me, or perhaps appear in the doorway to invite me back in. She had to know I wouldn’t have wandered far away without a wristbeacon. 

Time passed, more than an hour, I thought, and then most of the lights in the shelter went out. Well, that answered that question. She didn’t want to have to talk to me again until the morning. I waited another thirty minutes or so, to give her time to go to sleep, and then I walked quietly back into the shelter. 

=====

Chakotay’s figure was silhouetted in the entryway, facing me, but I couldn’t see the expression on his face. He didn’t say anything. 

“Come to bed,” I said. He hesitated. “Please,” I added. He crossed the open room until he stood beside our bed. I pulled back the covers and patted the mattress beside me. 

“Computer, increase lights twenty percent,” he ordered. When he could see me, he observed, “You’re wearing a nightgown. Let me change,” before going into our dressing area. 

Yes, I’d donned sleepwear for the first time in six weeks. Yet I’d left our double bed joined and invited him to share it.  _ Mixed signals, Janeway _ . He was following my lead. 

I hoped he’d be willing to follow what I had in mind now. 

He reappeared in ‘fleet-issue sleepwear, shorts and loose t-shirt. He padded across the room on bare feet and without hesitation crawled in next to me, pulling the covers over both our lower bodies. He lay on his side, propped on an elbow, and waited for my next move. 

I turned to lean back against the wall, facing him, sitting cross-legged on the bed and careful not to touch him, just as he had avoided contact with me so far. My heart was in my throat. 

“You said our crew was coming to rescue us.” 

He frowned at the unexpected angle, then nodded. 

“We’re not being rescued,” I said flatly. 

His eyebrows shot up. He unthinkingly clapped a hand to his chest, quickly sitting up and swinging his legs off the bed. “I didn’t take my communicator. You heard from  _ Voyager _ again? What’s happened?” He twisted to study my face, desperate for more information. 

“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said hastily. “I’m sorry, I’m making a hash of this. Please, Chakotay, lie down. I’m … trying to talk to you. About my feelings.” He straightened around slowly, this time lying on his back with his hands under his head. I remembered so many nights when he’d lain in that position while we talked after making love, and I felt a sharp pang of impending loss. 

I took a deep breath. “I didn’t tell you everything about how I met Justin.” 

He grimaced. “Do I need to hear this, Kathryn? Now?” 

“I think you do.” My voice was steady. “I promise there’s a point to it.” 

He closed his eyes and nodded for me to go on. 

“Owen Paris and I were captured by Cardassians and held for eight hours. He was tortured in my hearing.” 

He cursed, and suddenly he was on his knees before me. I tried to smile, wanting to reassure him. 

“I’m fine, Chakotay.” I brought a hand to his face, stroking it. “They didn’t hurt me, not really.” 

He couldn’t restrain himself any longer and put his arms around me. He kissed my hair and rubbed both hands along my back, as if seeking reassurance that I was indeed well and whole. 

“They didn’t -- ? In the camps, I saw so many --  _ Fuck _ ,” he breathed out in a harsh whisper and crushed me to him harder. Then he released me, returning my back to the wall and sitting away from me. “I’m sorry, Kathryn. I’m -- making this about me, and it’s not. I’m listening.” 

I smiled again and patted his knee affectionately, awkwardly. “I’m sorry I never told you before. I didn’t really mean to keep it from you. It just … never came up, I suppose.” 

He looked skeptical but nodded and waited for me to go on. 

“Justin led the commandos that came for us. He pulled me out of my cell himself, and we escaped together. We’d been coworkers on the  _ Icarus _ for months before that, but I hadn’t known he was a Ranger. He’d had his own experience in the hands of the Cardassians -- days, not hours. We … got together soon after he rescued me.” 

He took a moment to absorb that information, then said, “Okay. What does this have to do with us? WIth … now?” 

“I have been rescued from captivity. That is not what this is.” 

His dark eyes searched my face. He looked thoughtful. “Are you saying … you don’t want to leave?” 

I sighed. “No, I want to go. I think you know that I never fully reconciled myself to our life here.” 

He nodded and took my hand. “I know. Neither did I, to be honest.” 

That surprised me. “You always seemed so content. So adaptable.” 

He shrugged. “Making the most of a difficult situation. Taking full advantage of its good points.” He flashed his dimples at me -- not a leer, but not far from one. I smiled despite myself. 

“There were good points,” I affirmed. “In fact, that’s my point: we’ve had a life here on New Earth. It might have been longer, and even fuller in its way, than the lives we’ll return to. So I'll never call  _ Voyager _ 's return our  _ rescue _ . Especially not with what it will cost us.” 

His hand was so warm around mine. His voice was warmer. “What will leaving cost you, Kathryn?” 

I raised our clasped hands from my lap and intertwined my fingers with his, the way we’d held hands the night that it all started between us. “Do you have to ask, Chakotay?” I murmured. 

“Please. I need to hear you say it.” 

Sighing, I brought our joined hands towards me and brushed my cheek with the back of his hand. I closed my eyes as a wave of pleasure mixed with sorrow moved through me. Then I released his hand and met his gaze directly, unsmiling. 

“I call myself a scientist, but I’m the worst kind of superstitious fool. I thought by not telling you I love you, not saying the words aloud, I might keep you. Now I’m losing you anyway, and I can’t get our time together back.” 

My voice grew huskier as I continued. “If I could, though ... if we could go back in time … I would tell you every day, Chakotay. Every hour. I love you.” Now his mouth fell open, not to speak but in shock. 

I repeated myself. “I love you.” And again: “I love you.” I wrapped my arms around myself, hugging my elbows. “Maybe six weeks ago -- maybe yesterday -- it would have meant something, other than what it means now: that I am a coward, and that I am losing you.” 


	4. Chapter 4

Kathryn was merciless, brutal in her self-condemnation. As per usual. 

I wondered if she knew how cruel she was being to me as well, finally telling me she loved me, but only in order to flog herself for being human. 

Before I could speak, she put her hands on my shoulders and leaned into me. Our foreheads touched and she kissed me lightly before staring intently into my eyes and saying, “I know I don’t deserve a second chance at this --” and my heart leapt; was she reconsidering already? “-- but please, Chakotay, can we try again?”

My hands were on her waist and I was already kissing her back before I thought to question what she was saying. “Try what again?” I muttered, sliding my lips along her perfect jawline to her earlobe. 

“Yessss….” she breathed. “Make me feel good,” and she brought my hands to her breasts, then ran her own hands up my arms and under my shirtsleeves. “Make me beg for it, lose control.” 

When her words registered, I pulled back sharply, holding her at arm’s length. “You don’t like to lose control.” 

Her face was a study in exquisite torment. She seemed suspended between mortification and rage. “I want to give myself over to you. Really and fully, for once. You were right when you said I’ve always held something back. I want to let go.” 

I tried to keep my voice steady, my tone patient. “Why now?” 

“Just … to show you. That I trust you. That … I love you. To remember, when we -- can’t.” Her voice broke and she hid her face in her hands. I heard her mutter, “Seventy years, Chakotay.” 

I ran a hand up her arm, then made myself stop. “You don’t have to prove that you love me. I already knew.” 

She raised her face, running her hands back through her hair. As she drew her elbows back, her breasts were outlined clearly under her nightgown, nipples firm, and my mouth went dry with desire. 

“Then since you know me so well. Help me forget.” 

I didn’t argue with her after that. I just did my best to do what she asked of me. 

=====

As he set to the task like a man on a mission, I did the math. Six weeks or so of twice-a-day sex, sometimes more … by now he’d brought me to orgasm well over a hundred times. 

He knew my body almost as well as I did, had taught me a few things along the way, in fact. 

He knew to stroke the undersides of my breasts while he thumbed one nipple and sucked on the other, even if he didn’t know exactly how the dual sensation shot through me like electricity. 

He knew I liked to climax first while upright, arching my whole spine backward and grinding my sex down against whatever part of him was sending me into ecstasy. 

This time it was his hand between my legs as we knelt together on the bed, before I went limp and boneless and he put me on my back and dove in with his mouth. I came again quickly under his tongue, a rising shudder rendering me rigid and gasping silently for air. He raised his head to check my face, and I found a smile for him, still panting. He wiped his mouth with his hand, kissed my inner thigh, and then rolled us over and up the mattress to let me ride his face. 

As my hands gripped the headboard that he had planed and carved for our joined bed, I felt a sinking, gnawing sensation in my gut. I could feel his tongue, lips, and teeth busy and relentless, feel his large hands on my ass, hear and feel him moaning into me, exquisite vibrations making my toes curl. But all I could see before me was this other work of his hands, his gift of making, and I knew that I was destroying everything he had built here with such care, such devotion. I squeezed my eyes shut, blocking out the sight. My hands still knew what they held. 

I stopped rocking myself on his gorgeous, generous mouth, lifted myself, and turned around. I was naked, had been almost from the start, while he remained clothed. His erection tented the loose fabric of his shorts. I stepped my knees carefully over his arms, straddling his chest, biceps trapped under my shins. I worked his shorts down his body, pausing to give his cock a long, wet lick. He shuddered beneath me and then raised my feet onto his shoulders, soles up, massaging one in each hand, kissing the arch of one foot, then another. Once I got his shorts past his knees he kicked them off unassisted. 

I crouched over him and took him in my mouth, reaching behind his strongly muscled thighs to raise his knees. He moaned, then said in a somewhat desperate voice, “Kathryn, wait -- let me -- this is for you…” 

Around a mouthful of hot thrusting cock I just said, “Uh-uh” and kept going. He moaned again, more loudly, then shoved my feet apart, grabbed my hips, and manhandled my lower body into position over his mouth. His tongue fucked me, swirling and curling, then pulled back to lap along my opening, his lips kissing and softly biting at my slick labia. Over and over, he alternated, working me towards yet another frenzy. 

I knew that if I tilted my hips, pressed my clit against his chin, I’d get off again in short order. He felt so damn good in my cunt, tasted so damn good in my mouth, his powerful thighs and ass cheeks flexing in my hands. But if I came again, he’d want to switch things up. It was better this way, not seeing his face, not letting him see mine. I redoubled my efforts to drive him wild, determined to prolong this time of mindless mutual pleasure. 

After a couple more minutes, though, he was pushing my hips up and away from his mouth and calling to me. “Kathryn, wait. This isn’t working -- stop.” I lifted my head, leaving his hard dick glistening, and asked, “What’s wrong?” I didn’t turn around. 

“This isn’t what you wanted. You’re not letting me take charge.” 

“Changed my mind. Is that okay?” Without waiting for an answer, I grabbed his raised knees to pull myself up and along his body, deliberately dragging my chest and abdomen against the head of his cock as I went. When my knees reached his hips, I raised myself higher, curled my hips forward and leaned back. When I found the right angle, I sank down onto him, swift and sure. He grunted a “ _ Shit _ !” from behind me and gripped my hips hard. I tried to start riding him but he held me still, even as the muscles of his own lower body were rhythmically clenching and releasing, rocking him into me more deeply. 

“Please,” he groaned. “This isn’t -- please don’t, don’t make me come like this. I want, I just, if it’s our last time --” he drew breath, a half-sob of desire and grief. “I need to see your face,  _ please Kathryn _ !” 

I froze outwardly, emotion churning inside me. He stopped talking, stopped moving. Released my hips, letting his hands fall limp to the mattress. For some seconds, the only sound was our heavy breathing, out of rhythm, mine faster, his harsher and deeper as he struggled for control. 

I rose, sliding off him, and climbed over his body to sit on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor. 

After a minute, he came to a sitting position behind me, close but not touching. “Why won’t you look at me?” He sounded gruff. He was trying so hard to hide his pain -- pain that I was causing. The knowledge sat heavy in my chest until I could barely breathe around it. 

“Can’t,” I finally muttered. “I’ll start crying.” 

Silence for a bit. Then he choked out, “We’re both … in this. Why  _ not  _ cry. Together.” 

I had no answer to that. I just knew that if I turned to meet his gaze, if I let him see the rictus of misery on my face at that moment, things would crumble that I desperately needed to shore up. 

Eventually, I said, “I’m sorry, Chakotay. I’m really, truly sorry. About --” 

I gave a small, futile wave that encompassed our abortive lovemaking, my misguided intentions in seducing him, the separation I was forcing on us, all the ways I had hurt him and would go on hurting him. 

“Everything. I’m sorry.” I found my voice was trembling, despite my best efforts at projecting calm, and I escaped to the bathroom before I broke down in front of him. 

=====

I didn’t try to stop her leaving. After I’d failed to give her the comfort and distraction she’d asked me for, I didn’t trust myself not to make it worse. 

I found my shorts on the floor, crawled into bed, and called for the lights to dim. I curled up on her side of the bed, facing the wall, so she wouldn’t have to climb over me later. I lay there, eyes closed, remembering her shoulders hunched in despair, her voice grating an all-encompassing apology that rang like a death sentence in my skull. 

I heard a muffled sob from the bathroom. I pressed my lips together and did not raise my head to hear better. No use listening if she wouldn’t let me in. Yet I couldn’t suppress a little flare of stubborn confidence. She was still crying. I hated that her sorrow reassured me, but it did. She’d closed a door between us, but doors could be opened again. 

The computer told me it was just after midnight.  _ Today _ , I thought.  _ We leave today _ . Wretchedness and the day’s exertions turned my body to lead, dull and heavy. I felt myself drifting and welcomed the oblivion. 


	5. Chapter 5

I woke up knowing everything I’d known the night before: that  _ Voyager _ was returning for us, that Kathryn meant to end things, that we’d gone to bed hopeless and hurting. My first thought on waking, accordingly, was mild surprise and gratitude that we had both slept at all. 

The sun hadn’t been up long. I had turned in the night, seeking my peace, my center, and so when I opened my eyes, I could just lie still and watch her for a long time. In the cheering light of morning, her deep relaxation seemed proof that, for all the heartbreak we’d put each other through the night before, she must know at a core level that she belonged here: in our bed, my arm over her waist. 

I tested again the notion that, as she had suggested, I was in denial. That I wasn’t taking the complications seriously, that I was fooling myself about her capacity to end our intimacy. 

My head could contemplate the possibility, but even though I’d had my doubts during the emotional turmoil of the night before, my gut now told me once again not to worry. She was mine, and I was hers, and everything else in our lives would simply have to fall in place around that bedrock truth. 

Eventually she began to rouse, eyelids fluttering, limbs making slight, pre-waking motions. She rolled from her back to her side, facing me, delicate hands nested on the pillow. 

I moved closer, her knees in the crook of my hips, and let my hand stroke lightly, up from her waist and then down to the swell of her hip, again and again. My lips came to her forehead and rested there, nose at her hairline, breathing in her scent, hearing her small murmurs. 

This simple closeness sang in my heart, almost chastely.  _ If we could only have this, I’d be happy _ , I thought. 

Then her hands found the hem of my t-shirt and slid under it, cool and smooth against my warm skin, and I knew I was a damn liar. 

She tipped her face up and my mouth claimed hers directly. I pulled her close with both arms, full frontal body contact, our nightclothes doing absolutely nothing to hide our rising arousal from one another. 

It was so simple like this: no greater goal than closeness and pleasure. No need to promise what was tangible reality -- us, together, here and now, right and true and easy. This could have been any morning of the preceding weeks. It could be any morning in our future life together. 

Her hands inside my shirt twisted to grasp the fabric and then she was pushing it up. I raised my arms over my head and broke our kiss long enough to pull it off, and then she was pulling me back hungrily for more kisses, running her hands over my back and shoulders, moaning into my mouth. 

I forgot about distracting her or proving anything, forgot everything but the smell and sounds and taste and sight of her and my singularly focused need to be as close to her as possible. She was so responsive, so present and delighted, no filters, no constraints. 

We pulled my shorts off together as my lips were busy at the base of her throat. She briefly raised her hips to let me ruck her nightgown up to her waist. While my hands found their way up under the gown to stroke her back and play with her breasts, she hooked her top leg behind my butt and pulled our lower bodies together. 

We both moaned when her slick heat met my hard cock, sliding wetly as our hips rolled in counterpoint. I brought a hand to her rear and twisted my tailbone slightly until her gasp told me I was hitting her clit just right, just the way she needed. As I repeated the motion, over and over, my mouth sought hers again, intent on devouring her, delighting her. 

Eventually my hand slipped lower and she raised her knee further up my body, clearing the way for my fingers. They traced her cleft, probing, and as one circled her entrance, she tipped her head back, arching her whole body into mine. 

She hissed, “Yesss…” as I sank two fingers inside her, and then as I scissored and curled them, massaging her inner walls, a frenzy was released within her. She squirmed against me, her pelvis crushing my cock against my body, the heel of her one foot pressed hard into my buttock, her arms and hands gripping whatever parts of me they could reach as though she meant to pull me entirely inside her skin, as though she might fuse us at the molecular level with the force of her climax. 

Her cry at her peak was wordless, ecstatic. But as I lapped at the sweat on her exposed throat and caressed her down gently, backing away from her twitching nub, easing us apart, she spoke my name clearly, in a voice like honeycomb in sunshine. 

“Chakotay.” Most of her sagged in sudden relaxation, but her hands gripped the sides of my head and raised my face to meet hers. I parted my lips, thinking she would kiss me, but her eyes … I fell into her eyes with their look of tender regard. 

“I love you so much, Chakotay,” she breathed, and still her eyes were fixed on mine, no walls, no avoidance.  

She rolled to her back, tugging me above her, still gazing into my eyes. I was lost in blue-gray sunbeams, held fast in the intimacy of the moment. Then she nestled me between her thighs, drew up her legs, and her wet warm questing called me back to my senses. 

I groaned, spread her more widely open to me with my knees, and then easily sank deep within her body. “Kathryn….” 

“I love you,” she repeated. 

We didn’t need to kiss. We barely even rocked into one another. If either of us blinked, I don’t remember it. All I knew was Kathryn, her eyes, her heat, her breath, and a swirling white energy coiling from our joined loins. It forced air from our lungs and then pulled it back into them, in sync, her breasts sliding more and more quickly across my chest as we panted, her hands pressing us together. I heard my own voice sounding breathy jagged moans and felt my hips curling and releasing, finally carried by our rising pleasure into smooth strokes in and out, coaxing little whimpers of shocked delight from Kathryn at the apex of every thrust. 

I wanted this to last forever. 

But as soon as I had the thought my orgasm began to swell upward. She felt it too in the new rigidity of my arms pressed tightly to her sides, in the jerk of my hips. I was helpless in the onrushing cascade of my own pleasure, carried too swiftly before it to do anything more to bring her along. 

When my eyes closed of their own accord she heard the protest and regret in my strangled moan and said, “I want you to. Like this, just like this. I love you. I love you.” And I spilled myself into her, my toes digging into the mattress to push myself ever more deeply into her, my hands clutching spasmodically at her shoulders, all other sensation blacked out for long moments by the force that took me and turned my being inside out within her. 

Awareness found me on my side, draped over her body, my palm caressing her cheek, fingers in her hair. 

“Wow…” I breathed, feeling the room spin around us. 

She rolled into me. I ended on my back, an arm loosely draped along hers. She purred in my ear, “Good wow?” and I fell asleep without replying. 

=====

I left him sleeping. There was the shuttle to prepare for its return to the ship, and I selfishly wanted time awake and alone to think about what we had just experienced. If it would never happen again -- and  _ it wouldn’t, couldn’t _ , I told myself firmly -- then surely I could be permitted an hour or two to ponder and relive it, before everything changed and such thoughts could pose a dangerous temptation. 

The walk took me close to an hour. Reasoning that the shuttle’s tech was the thing most likely to attract Vidiian attention, we’d left it distant from our homestead, amid rougher terrain where the substrata contained ores that might help to mask it from space. As I walked, I thought about the past day, the past six weeks, and how any part of them could possibly fit into the life that was returning to pull me back onto a path I’d thought was gone forever. 

I tested Chakotay’s assertion that I didn’t know my own limits as a captain, that there was some other way to view matters of the heart on a Starfleet vessel. He was so certain that we could make a relationship work in a hierarchical command structure that regularly dealt in life or death decisions. I had no basis on which to share that optimism; on the contrary, all the training and experience of my career up to this point disputed it. 

Furthermore, I had no illusions about how hard it was to hide personal conduct in such a small community. Even as distant as I held myself from the shipboard rumor mill, I knew the crew had talked about the two of us from the start. I could very well imagine what they must already assume about how we had spent our time stranded here. As it was, we’d have to work hard to squelch the rumors, be twice as professional, twice as correct as we’d been before. 

The shuttle was just as we’d left it. Doing a systems check and setting the computer to do a thorough sweep and decontamination cycle took me only a few minutes. Now a pilot would be able to beam directly from  _ Voyager _ into the shuttle and fly it back to the ship, without risking exposure to the virus. 

I sat on the ground in the shuttle’s shade to rest a bit before starting the long walk back. It was coming up on 1000 hours now, which meant we had another six hours or so before  _ Voyager _ would hit orbit. There wasn’t much left to do to prepare, particularly if Chakotay had seen to things back at the shelter -- and I had no doubt he would have done by the time I returned. 

He and I were at an impasse. We weren’t going to change one another’s mind through further discussion. Well, I didn’t need to change his mind. He’d said he would respect my authority and support my decision. Once we were back in uniform, back on the ship and in our accustomed roles, this would all be much easier. 

Surely I wouldn’t go on feeling compelled by the sight of the man to either burst into tears or fall into bed with him. 

Still, it couldn’t hurt to just … minimize our time together for the next few hours. 

I stayed by the shuttle, checking readings and dictating logs. I had a month and a half of botanical and horticultural research to report. 

I made no mention of anything personal. 

=====

I woke alone. Kathryn had left a note letting me know where she’d gone -- a thoughtful gesture, but its formal wording suggested that she’d also wanted to remove any reason for me to comm her. 

After showering, I eyed the uniform that Kathryn had replicated for me, but I dressed in civvies. We had hours yet before  _ Voyager _ was expected. 

By late morning, I’d done all I could to prepare the shelter for our departure. A look at the tricorder told me that Kathryn was still at the shuttle: she was avoiding me. It hurt, after what we had shared this morning, but … I wasn’t surprised. 

I decided I’d make it easier for her and take advantage of what might be my last chance for a long time to meditate planetside. I packed a simple meal from yesterday’s harvest, then grabbed my medicine bundle and headed for the riverbank. 

The sun was well past its apex when I came out of my trance, feeling unsettled. The Caretaker’s array floated in the center of my vision, the way a bright light leaves a dark shadow on the retina. 

Sister Wolf hadn’t given me anything very clear this time. Her presence had been more of a prod than a comfort, nosing my palm with a cold wet nose, then placing her teeth on either side of my hand, as if in warning. I caught myself checking the back of my hand for evidence and shook my head at my own foolishness. 

My tricorder told me it was nearly 1500 hours. Kathryn hadn’t commed or come to check on me. I tamped down a little flare of concern by verifying via tricorder that she was at the shelter, alive and well. 

I walked back along the trail our feet had worn through the grasses. Familiar ground, by now, though three months was the blink of an eye at my age. A mere blip in a man’s lifetime, or in the journey yet ahead of us, from New Earth to Old. More than any planet,  _ Voyager _ was my home, and I’d be back aboard her very soon now.  

Yesterday morning the shelter had been our home. Now its empty interior came to mind, echoing strangely as I’d walked out of it a few hours ago. I swallowed, trying to erase the hollow feeling in my gut. Kathryn was there -- I’d just checked the tricorder. 

Surely no place with Kathryn in it would ever be empty or strange to me. 

I came into the shelter and found her standing in the middle of the open space, her eyes on a PADD. She was in uniform, her hair up in the bun I hadn’t seen since our first days here. 

She looked up and gave me a bright smile. “There you are. Been to the river one last time?” 

The pips were on her collar; the captain’s mask was back on her face. I should have expected it; I knew too well that the uniform was powerful medicine, like a shaman’s robes or a bride’s hair ornaments. 

I looked down at my tunic and trousers, earth tones in coarse weave, dirt on my knees. 

“Yes,” I said, and did not elaborate. “I’ll -- just get changed.” 

“Of course,” she nodded, and moved past me to leave the shelter. Giving me privacy to disrobe. Respecting my modesty, and hers. As if we hadn’t grappled naked three times in the past day, countless times in the past weeks. I blinked, and my sense of gutted disorientation grew. 

“Stop,” I told myself silently, as I shook the replicator-fresh folds out of my uniform. “Captain is a persona, a role. It’s not her.” 

I was securing my rank bar to my collar when my comm badge chirped. “Commander,  _ Voyager _ is in orbit.” It was Kathryn’s voice. 

Dreamlike, I tapped my badge. “Acknowledged, Captain. I’ll be right out.” 

Tuvok was punctual, of course. It was time to leave our quarantine with a dormant virus. Time to be cured and restored to command. We had a ship to run, a mission, a crew to take care of. 

I walked out of the shelter to find Kathryn gazing at her seedlings. Before I could ask for even nonverbal acknowledgment of what this moment meant, the primate decided to put in an appearance. She said goodbye to the damn monkey with more emotion than she was showing me. 

With more emotion than she’d shown when she gave the order to destroy the Caretaker’s array. 

It had been her only way home to the man she had promised to marry. She’d obliterated it with steel in her jaw. To save a species she’d only known for a few days and would leave behind to take care of themselves. For barely more than an idea, really. 

Captain Janeway ordered the beam-out, and I finally realized what my animal guide had been trying to tell me. 

_ Take care: Caution, beware _ . 

Kathryn was more than capable of destroying her own happiness to do what she thought was right. 

_ Take care: Farewell, goodbye.  _

**Author's Note:**

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